Tag: Vintage

My favorite room in my house is my living room. It gets the prettiest morning sunlight from the east that spills across the room. It’s also one of the rooms in my house with the biggest transformation after we installed the vintage hardwood floors.

I’ve always loved the natural look of woodwork in a home and I’m so glad the trend of painting everything white is starting to come to an end. Natural wood can last for hundreds of years and can be refinished again and again to look like new. As I’ve done projects in my house, I’ve tried to stick to the original wood character as much as possible, which has meant a lot of restoration projects.

I’m loving the trend of light to medium wood that is finished to show the beauty of natural grain. It can create a great focal spot for any room. See some of my favorite inspo below!

Next on my list of remodel goals is my kitchen. This has been pretty far back on the list due to it being so expensive! My thought on this has been to save up for what I really want so that I only have to do it once, so I have begun the process of assessing wants and the costs of them.

Last weekend I toured the historic Burwell House in Minnetonka, Minnesota. The house was built in the late 1800’s and has been preserved and restored to be historically accurate. The workmanship and interior of the house are stunning. It was even more beautiful since it was decorated for Christmas (and they gave me apple cider!). I’ve been going all out in Christmas decor the past few years but I’m feeling so inspired by the simplicity. And those beautiful textiles… #hearteyes

In part one, I shared how I installed vintage hardwood floors in my hallway. For those of you not keeping up, I salvaged hardwood flooring from a tear down house to match with the existing flooring in my house. That meant cutting each board out, stripping the nails, and sorting out boards that had been damaged or cut off.

Taking on the living room was a much bigger process. After weeks of measuring, squaring, and then ripping up carpet and the plywood sub floor, we put down new tar paper, marked out the studs to nail into, and started flooring.

When I bought my house, most of the flooring was covered in beige carpeting (an interior designer’s nightmare). One of the bedrooms had the hardwood floor exposed and although it wasn’t in the best of condition, I knew it could be re-sanded. When I finally had access to the house and went to rip up the carpet, I was heartbroken to find that the bedrooms and all of the closets in the house had hardwood floors, but the hallway and living room did not.

After coming to terms with the fact that I would wait until my house was paid off and then save up to install the floors, I lived with the awful carpet and tried to work around it. Then, in a match made in remodel heaven, I had the opportunity to rip the exact same vintage red oak flooring out of a house that was being torn down. And by rip, I mean we literally cut the nails underneath the floor to pull up the boards without damaging them. For over 500 square feet of flooring.

We then had to use a punch to remove the nails one by one and note if any of the end groves had been cut. I also measured each board and noted its length on a piece of tape and stacked the wood by size in my basement. Sounds like absolute madness right? But just wait!

We started adding the flooring in my hallway after ripping the carpet and sub floor. Luckily the house had been set up for the hardwood floor so we just had to continue out from the bedroom doorway. A few of the door frames had to be cut so we could slip the boards under without any gaping. We also had to add a transition board to the back bedroom and closet where the flooring wouldn’t have lined up.

At some points we were sliding rows in that we’re the exact distance from the bedroom to the closet without any gaps in the rows. This is where heaving the measurements on the boards came in pretty handy!

After a few weekends of working and hiring a professional to come sand it, you could barely tell the floor wasn’t installed in 1950 with the rest of the house.